By day 7 you should have a feel for what people mean when they say you are directly editing the AST.
Basically: there is the same amount of friction to moving constructs around at a high level as there is at a low level, and this is due to Lisp’s uniform syntax, and paredit leverages this a lot.
Contrast this to a language like Java, where the friction between modifying a single expression and modifying class-level interactions are totally different, syntactically. Now you find yourself leaning on highly specific IDE-level support or Lombok for things like setting up Builders for every POJO, to get around these constraints.
From a Lisper’s perspective, these syntactic constraints are unnecessary, and should at most require a library that you can trivially port to any editor. Which is exactly what paredit achieves.